Speechlessly Returning to the Studio
#307 / Flood Time Capsule: 2019
Five years ago this week, The Flood returned to the studio to begin recording a new album. This one had a mission and a format not present in any of its half dozen predecessors.
While each of the previous Flood discs since 2001 had included a few instrumental tracks, this latest project — to be called Speechless — was to be the guys’ first all-instrumental album.
“The Flood has had an enduring affinity for vocals,” we would say in the liner notes. “Singing is central to its folk songs and swing numbers, its jug band tunes and blues.
“However, that eclectic repertoire also always has been built on a strong instrumental foundation,” the notes continued, “and now, as The Flood approaches its half-century anniversary, it is high time that we put the spotlight on the primary pickers."
Moreover, the album — engineered and produced by freshly minted Floodster Paul Martin — also was to be a tribute and a very public “thank you” to our venerable bandmate Doug Chaffin.
Doug by then had been in the band for nearly 20 years, playing a slew of instruments, from upright bass and guitar to mandolin and fiddle. We tried to capture Doug’s musical diversity with the cover:
Incidentally, long before the winter of 2019 when we started recording Speechless, we already were regularly bragging about Doug’s musical chops. Click the button below, for instance, to hear an audio snippet from a 2017 show in Charleston in which Michelle and Charlie talk about how many important roles Doug had played in the band:
Recording at Paul’s House
So, the new album began on a Tuesday night, Jan. 22, 2019, when Doug trekked with Sam St. Clair, Randy Hamilton and Charlie Bowen to Paul Martin’s mountaintop home and studio for the first of four recording sessions over the next couple of months.
“It was a very good session,” Charlie later told his cousin Kathy in an email, “but a long one. I didn’t get home until 11 last night. I’m going to see if the guys would like to have another session soon, but start earlier and not have to push so late into the evening. We’ll see.”
That plan worked out. In the second session the following week, the guys returned to Paul’s warm home to record another four or five tunes to add to the four they already had in the can.
Stew Schneider, Guest Artist
Another special element on the new album was bringing back Flood Emeritus Stew Schneider to sit as a guest artist on several tunes playing Autoharp.
Stew was one of the earliest players with the band back in the 1970s, alternating between bass and harmonica, even plucking a little banjo with us.
Production and Promotion
The band finished up the recording for the disc by the end of Winter 2019, but the production — Paul’s mixing, Charlie’s album design, etc. — took another year.
During that period, the band talked up the project at various gigs. At a Route 60 Saturday Night show one October night in 2019, for example, the group featured Doug on this tune that would be on the album:
But Then COVID and a Virtual Party
The COVID-19 pandemic was raging by the time the album was released, which meant we couldn't have our usual album release party to introduce the new work. So, to compensate, we relied on a new technology: a virtual album release party, hosted on YouTube by Michelle and Charlie. Check it out below:
A year later we also put the entire album online as part of our free Radio Floodango music streaming service. To hear it, click here.
Doug, post-COVID
Despite vaccinations and boosters, the pandemic was hard on all of us, but none more so than on Doug. In January 2020, a year after we started recording Speechless, Doug was struck by the virus and spent nearly three weeks in the hospital. At about the same time, he also was diagnosed with prostate cancer, treatment for which dropped his immune system to zero.
Masked and distanced, we continued to jam and visit with him whenever we could, but from early 2020 on, we all knew our time with our old buddy was growing short. We grieved his passing at age 82 in late 2023.